RB1 - Cuban Isolationists

[Talamane]

And that's no pun.

Three religions! Unless something stupid happens, i would think the game is in the bag. Watch the master!

 

[AndrewN]

I'm not sure if I am reading those screenshots correctly, but in the last picture why is Havana growing if you are building a settler?

I thought the top bar below the city represented the number of turns until the city grew and the lower bar the number of turns to complete the build. Also there is no growth if you are building a worker or settler, all the other screenshots seem to indicate this.

 

[Sirian]

I'm not sure if I am reading those screenshots correctly, but in the last picture why is Havana growing if you are building a settler?

I thought the top bar below the city represented the number of turns until the city grew and the lower bar the number of turns to complete the build. Also there is no growth if you are building a worker or settler, all the other screenshots seem to indicate this.

Havana is indeed NOT growing. It does have some food stored, though, and that food is shown (the orange on the left side).

 

[AndrewN]

Havana is indeed NOT growing. It does have some food stored, though, and that food is shown (the orange on the left side).

It has 24 in brackets after the name. If that isn't the number of turns to grow what dose it mean?

 

[Sirian]

It has 24 in brackets after the name. If that isn't the number of turns to grow what dose it mean?

Well, OK. Fair point. The city is not growing, though, so that number is misleading. (Apparently, that's the number of food needed to grow again).

It's a bug!

I watch the bars, not the numbers, so I wouldn't have noticed.


- Sirian

 

[AndrewN]

Well, OK. Fair point. The city is not growing, though, so that number is misleading. (Apparently, that's the number of food needed to grow again).

It's a bug!

I watch the bars, not the numbers, so I wouldn't have noticed.


- Sirian

Ah, OK

I'll get a copy soon so I can stop asking you all these stupid questions

 

[eotinb]

Well, OK. Fair point. The city is not growing, though, so that number is misleading. (Apparently, that's the number of food needed to grow again).

It's a bug!

I watch the bars, not the numbers, so I wouldn't have noticed.


- Sirian

Something similar happens during anarchy. All builds show up as total number of shields, as if each city were making 1 spt. (Not sure but I think the same is true for food). It may be a bug, but I think it's kinda handy as long as you know what it does and doesn't mean. Happened to me when I got to pick a new build in a city the same turn I revolted. It was nice to see right away how many shields something would take (rather than "--" or some other indicator that nothing is being built) once things got back to normal.

 

[Sirian]

OK, so... I accidentally pulled a Sulla.

I wanted to wrap up "a couple of things" in that solo game, then I would start in on my turn for RB1. So I needed a couple more turns (for me, it's not really "one more turn", OK? I'm -worse- than most.) A couple more turns to see if I can finish this important wonder before an AI snatches it. A couple more turns to try to carry out some tech trades when my new tech comes in. A couple more turns for this, a couple more turns for that, and the next thing you know it's SIXTEEN HOURS LATER.

I'm sorry about that! Just let me play a couple MORE turns (seriously! I, um... I'll set the alarm!) and then I'll be ready for my SG turn.



Thanks for your patience.


- Sirian

 

[kryszcztov]

That's some well-done advertisement for Firaxis !! You're only consultant ?

and the next thing you know it's SIXTEEN HOURS LATER.

I know I can play many hours in a row, but 16 hours really sounds Korean, to say the least. I hope you got yourself a "food-plug" while playing !

 

[Sirian]

It wasn't sixteen hours of playing. More like six, plus sleep, plus answering more questions from fans than I ought to be doing, plus some other things.

Still. I -meant- to play six minutes and ended up with six hours. Sorry!

(I have been answering questions and checking discussions since my last point, and haven't started to play anything yet. Plus I need to get some breakfast. Can somebody PLEASE install that Solar Upgrade that extends the days to 34 hours apiece? Danke!)


- Sirian

 

[Sullla]

OK, so... I accidentally pulled a Sulla.

Hey - hey! I don't want *THAT* term entering into Succesion Game parlance! At least I was involved in a game with OTHER PEOPLE at the time!

 

[Sirian]

Oh man. My game on Emperor...! I have to tell this tale!

I saw three shiploads of Roman troops incoming toward my forward island town. I had ONE ARCHER there! JC was coming in with an archer and five chariots! Surprise attack. Lucky I was paying attention. Like... "Oh, I see a stack of nine units. That's a lot of units. Where could they be going? Oh. They must coming for ME!"



I switched production to a spearman (no barracks in this town). I needed to get SIX shields in to be able to whip the remaining 29 shields. ... I could JUST barely get to six! Feudalism was due in the next turn!

JC declares and lands!

I whip the spearman. I upgrade my lone archer to longbow. (Important strategic note: if you rush a military unit in single player, it will be produced before the AI makes its attack! So if you are in the right Civics, you can save your bacon if one extra unit will turn the tide!)



His stack attacks the next turn! THEY KILL THE LONGBOW! (Took three losses and two retreats doing it!) The spear survives. Two of his chariots retreated, and his archer is at half health.



I had to attack, using my 3.2/4.0 Spear vs his 1.6 Archer. I win that too!



His chariots are still licking their wounds. Sent that dog home whining to his mama. =)

Lucky that I got to Feudalism just in time, though!

Sometimes it's better to be lucky and good!

Good to keep some upgrade money on hand. You know? Just in case.

JC paid me 60g for peace a while later. (After ripping up some of my fishing nets). We made peace in 1210AD, and that is where I stopped to go play my next turn in RB1.



You just would not see the Civ3 AI make a stack landing of three full shiploads in one move.


I mean, like, I was going to stop in 800AD, but I had to play a couple more turns to finish the Hanging Gardens. And then it was a couple more turns to finish the Colossus. Then a couple more for a tech trade opportunity with Isabella. Then JC's ships arrived and I -HAD TO- play a couple more turns.

You all understand, right? You forgive me? I knew you would.


OK, let me get to the SG turn here.


- Sirian

 

[Sirian]

I had a strange thought seeing Sulla send that scout eastward: "A bit late to be sending out a scout." Then I thought, "Well, that is probably my paranoia from higher difficulty talking. This is Prince level, after all."

On the other hand, sending a settler out that far with one warrior escort who isn't even in the region yet? Um... no. Not doing that! Earlier, yes. Not 2000BC, though. (I think the extreme oddity of this opening has put Sulla in to some uncharted waters! I agree with the rest of his analysis, though.)

So I swap Havana to a warrior. No barracks, just one untrained regular warrior. But... two of these beats one of them. One is just begging the RNG gods to rain fire on our heads!

Check this out:



Instead of replacing the settler, the warrior is put in line ahead of it, and then the settler will continue automatically when the warrior completes.

You can also safely remove the settler from the build queue by clicking on it, if you want. The game will still remember your partial progress on it (as long as it hasn't been too long and decayed away).

With that, I begin my round.

1960BC: I move our westerly warrior toward Pink Dot(TM) and spot an English border. Sulla's assessment that Vicky lacks a second town is no longer up to date!



The town has to be at the white dot. (Why? ... Not telling!)


I move the scout eastward. Uh...



Dead meat. Croaker. Lamb to the slaughter. 15 shields down the tubes.

Ironically, the wee little bit of info I did pick up from this move indicates that there is less continent over that way than I thought there would be!

So my gut instinct on that one was correct after all: too late to be sending out scouts. (There is a point at which the animals give way, for the most part, to barbarian warriors. As the barbs get certain techs, they can bring on stronger units, too! Archers running around by 1500BC is not uncommon on higher difficulty!)

The barbs may, on occasion, make a push to take cities. Multiple units appear on the map and converge toward cities. He who runs the Civ3-style Farmer's Gambit is going to suffer! BUILD SOME MILITARY.

The worst part is that this Scout Snack is going to toughen the barbarian unit. They will promote!


1880BC: We learn Mining, I start Archery. (Should have started Wheel, actually, then done Archery next, but I was spooked by the barbarians!)


1760BC: Yep, more hostiles floating around, this time in the west. Without the extra warrior I ordered up, we could staring at some Big Huge Dice Rolls(TM) with the grab for Pink Dot(TM).



1720BC: The barb moves toward our eastern warrior. I move in to the forest.

1680BC: The barb attacks our warrior in the forest. We win (the very high probability outcome!) But we are severely wounded. I order the unit to rest.

1600BC: Settler completed. My turn comes to its end.

I think we are actually going to get the Pink Dot, thanks to Vicky's interest in the wheat resource at York.



STRONGLY urge both warriors to be guarding the new town! There are barbarians afoot!

 

[PriestOfDiscord]

I love reading this because it has multiple entertaining stories in one.

 

[Sirian]

OK, so here's a turn summary:

* Found out that English have a second town.
* Got Sulla's scout killed just by touching it.
* Built a warrior, trained a settler, learned Mining and Archery.
* Defeated one barbarian unit in the desert.


Dotmap - PLAN A



Orange Dot gets the Wheat, but this fails to close the gap between Pink and Orange.
I think this arrangement is stronger, but we have to build Blue Dot to seal off the east.


Dotmap - Plan B



White dot gets the Wheat, Orange will seal by itself.


Because we have built Stonehenge, we get an early peek at the globe view!



Most of the world is dark, but we can see the shape of it.




I started Havana on Barracks, intending to train at least two Archers before the next settler.
Sulla may have other plans, though. Options are wide open.


- Sirian

 

[Balastulin]

Man that zoom out globe really rocks. I remember putting that as one of my suggestions in the Civ 4 suggestions thread. Not that it'd need much thought. Also love the way the borders hug the rivers.

Really enjoying this thread, but still slightly puzzled by the religion choice - are you just grabbing the religions so that you can get money from the other civs?

 

[insydr]

Looks like I drew an Archipelago landmass type. (Tilted Axis defaults to "random" landmasses. Can be anything from massive continents to tiny islands!)

This sounds just like the completely random map feature that was present in Civ3 but missing in Civ4. Is there any way to do this without having to pick a tilted axis map? Or do we just have to rotate the view 90 degrees to get a completely random non-vertical map?

 

[Sullla]

I had a strange thought seeing Sulla send that scout eastward: "A bit late to be sending out a scout." Then I thought, "Well, that is probably my paranoia from higher difficulty talking. This is Prince level, after all."

On the other hand, sending a settler out that far with one warrior escort who isn't even in the region yet? Um... no. Not doing that! Earlier, yes. Not 2000BC, though. (I think the extreme oddity of this opening has put Sulla in to some uncharted waters! I agree with the rest of his analysis, though.)

So I swap Havana to a warrior. No barracks, just one untrained regular warrior. But... two of these beats one of them. One is just begging the RNG gods to rain fire on our heads!

Hey, you said to make Pink Dot a priority! One of the nice things about Civ4 is that you can swap a build without being penalized the way you would in Civ3. I agree on the extra warrior, btw - no sense in risking everything on a bad roll of the dice.

1960BC: I move our westerly warrior toward Pink Dot(TM) and spot an English border. Sulla's assessment that Vicky lacks a second town is no longer up to date!

She didn't have it last turn! Honest! And I did say that another city would pop up any turn now.

Dead meat. Croaker. Lamb to the slaughter. 15 shields down the tubes.

Ironically, the wee little bit of info I did pick up from this move indicates that there is less continent over that way than I thought there would be!

So my gut instinct on that one was correct after all: too late to be sending out scouts. (There is a point at which the animals give way, for the most part, to barbarian warriors. As the barbs get certain techs, they can bring on stronger units, too! Archers running around by 1500BC is not uncommon on higher difficulty!)

Bah, don't read too much into that scout ending his turn in the wrong spot. Nothing but bad luck there. Granted, if I was playing on Emperor, I'd have thought twice about build a scout and sending him out, but here on Prince, and before 2000BC? I've had scouts running around in the wilderness much later than this with no problems. A good principle to remember for the future, to be sure, but we just were unfortunate here. Heck, if I build the scout one turn LATER, that barb reaches our borders a turn earlier and Sirian avoids him easily.

1680BC: The barb attacks our warrior in the forest. We win (the very high probability outcome!) But we are severely wounded. I order the unit to rest.

1600BC: Settler completed. My turn comes to its end.

I think we are actually going to get the Pink Dot, thanks to Vicky's interest in the wheat resource at York.

Don't want to jinx things, but if we do get to Pink (which seems very likely...) What a major coup if we succeed! Poaching a marvelous site right out from under Vicky's nose.

STRONGLY urge both warriors to be guarding the new town! There are barbarians afoot!

Roger that, definitely. I like the idea of finishing the barracks and then training two archers (which will also allow Havana to grow further) before going back to rapid settler production.

Regarding dotmaps - is there a sea resource by the white dot in plan "A"? If there is, I like it better, if not I think I prefer the spacing in "B". "A" gets us a much stronger Orange dot, but the White dot on "A" is almost useless (if there's no resource down there for food). The fact that Orange plus Pink seal off our borders completely is a *MAJOR* advantage of "B" too, methinks. The speed at which Vicky chooses to expand may determine a lot of what I choose to do. If she looks like she's coming after the Orange dot site, that may force a change of plans. In the end, I'm sure we'll just figure it out as we go along.

I've got the save file and plan to sneak in 10 turns tonight. Speaker already tried to get me to jump into a MP game, but I declined (stupid work...)

 

[Sirian]

Yeah, the appeal of Plan A was the stronger Orange Dot. (You mentioned considering a cultural victory -- well you can probably write that off with Plan B!) I'm not sure about the seafood situation down there. Maybe it sucks. Scout it if possible?

I don't think either plan is a no brainer. Like, there may be more than one right answer.


- Sirian

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

Subscribing to this thread. Good game so far.